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Thrilling Tales, a Random Pulp Title Generator, and Time Goes On

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

The Goggles of the future are a permanent accessory

I’m now at forty illustrations for my first Thrilling Tales project – which puts me more or less halfway done. There are still three or four pictures that I’ll be revisiting, but heck, I’ll take my milestones as I find ’em. No matter how long the setup for a set of pictures takes, I still seem to average 1.25 days per illustration. This is a constant source of wonder for me.

Along the way I’ve been tinkering with a random pulp sci fi title generator – also for the Thrilling Tales site – which has really gelled now. It was an interesting problem that involved getting the right flavor for the titles while also creating variety in the sentence structure and coming up with a pretty extensive vocabulary. I’ve been trying to make sure that the titles almost always make grammatical sense without restricting their logical sense. There’s a kind of magic that happens with unexpected combinations. The more you restrict the potential nonsense, the more you lose of the unexpected wonders.

Anyway that’s a diversion, but in fact it’s meant to be a diversion: one of a series of little playthings to flesh out the content for the site. I want to do more of those…. but many of the ideas I have would be best done in Flash, and I don’t want to take the time to learn Flash at the moment, since it’s the stories that are the main event.



Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

 
 
2 responses to “Thrilling Tales, a Random Pulp Title Generator, and Time Goes On
Dave Van Dyke says:
December 18th, 2009 at 11:11 pm

This is SUCH a great site! Your work has a fantastic nostalgia quotient and its just FUN (as well as Downright Unusual). The image with the guy in the foreground wearing the metallic goggles is one I would LOVE to see made into a poster (any chance of this happening?). This reminds me so much of the comic books I used to read when I was a kid.

I love the dramatic under lighting in all your scenes…you’ve really got a knack for doing the dramatic 1930’s style of lighting.

Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing your talents with the world!

Dave

Bradley W. Schenck says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:20 am

Thanks!

I have rendered out poster-sized layers for one of the other shots of our friend Zeno here, but it’ll take quite a bit of post work before that one will be ready for print.

This one – and several of the others – has some potential too. The downside of making a bunch of pictures relatively quickly is that, well, I have to make a bunch of pictures relatively quickly. But the upside is that I get a bunch of compositions that may be great and may be good for other uses.

But doing anything about that potential has to wait on the freaking thing getting done :).

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